Well, first of all, nobody says that establishing norms requires the criminalizing of others, so you may be adopting a law of an excluded middle.
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They don't, but that is the form of imposition of choice in contemporary US society. A 20 year old today had *no* say in the development of our current norms regarding drug use even as he/she replicates the social dynamics related to those norms whether he/she is a drug user or not. That is obviously undemocratic and emblematic of the contestability of rationality, even as rational arguments can be put forward for prohibiting drug use that serve as apologetics for laws that were drawn up with/for totally different intentions. Again, I'm not saying the prohibitions are objectively justifiable or non-justifiable, it's the notion that we can't agree on whether they are either way the term *objectively* is used that is the issue. Dissensus over norms does not seem to be reducible to irrationality.
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But these norms tend to come from general cultural consensus;
they're the norms which people tend to follow, more or less, with
differing ideas of how to apply them. There are some values which human
beings do share, simply because we're the kind of creatures we are: for
example, most people regard the murder of children to be a pretty
heinous crime, and that didn't require any kind of propaganda or
hegemony to get people to believe this. (Matter of fact, it took a _lot_
of propaganda and coercion to get people to actually _do_ it.)
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Well that's true, but we were discussing the norms we *don't* share and in all probability will not share no matter how much discussion there is on the issues involved. The question then becomes how much tolerance, respectful aquiescense and pluralism do contemporary societies bring forth from their current and future practices of communication and how do we undo the contestedly rational/arational/irrational decisions/consequences that have been 'handed down' from our own past.
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And many of these things are subject to change: for one thing,
discrimination against gays is much more widely regarded as _wrong_ than
it was, say, thirty or forty years ago.
And one of the ways in which these norms change is through rational argument, and appeals to objectivity and truth. When we ask that people abandon their prejudices, and look at the world as it is, we _are_ appealing to objectivity and facts. Nobody would say that this is sufficient to change peoples' minds, but it's certainly one of the more benign and humanistic ways of doing so.
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I don't find the language of objectivity or truth helpful in determining whether the criminalization of insider trading or pot smoking should be permitted or forbidden. What you are asserting in the first paragraph above is/was a matter of shifts of intersubjective deliberation and the outcomes of deliberation that make the issue of whether homosexuality is objectively acceptable behavior moot. But then, that just may be a idiomatic quibble as I'm pretty sure that objectivity is [still] our secular stand-in/substitute for God on an enormous range of contentious issues.
There's just too much that's wrong with that quote. If Bauman is claiming that power _confers_ this right, then the issue of "rights" is empty: after all, if people have no power, they would have no "rights" to speak of. It's a statement as congenial to the fascist as anyone else: it says that rights are a function of having power. (Conversely, a humanist would argue that human beings have rights merely by dint of being human-- and that resistance to power is done to protect those rights from power's abuses.)
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Well there's an enormous philosophical literature that asserts that rights talk is empty. I would say that the statement is congenial to an enormous variety of authoritarianisms.
Anf if Bauman is arguing that the "right to define" is a function of power, then he runs the risk of abandoning the notion of empiricial or objective truth. It's one thing to question the claims of power and authority because those claims are factually wrong; it's another to assert that empirical fact is merely a function of power. The latter is merely a defense of power for its own sake.
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Well why else do you think many people who are infatuated with the idea of power *over* other people are into 'it' for? :-)
We're talking performativity and imposition not objectivity and empiricism; the *making* of objectivity and the empirical. At the same time, following Foucault and many others before and after him, it's a mistake of sorts to think of all forms of power as coercive imposition. Paradoxes proliferate when we cannot adjudicate the malleability/contestation of the various distinctions between *power to* and power over.* The ability of theNewtonian to redefine oxygen and eliminate the term pholigiston from the vocabulary of science was an expression of power too, and no one would call that coercive in a pejorative sense.
>Did I forget to mention that slave labor still exists on our planet
>compared to which the labor contracts of contemporary capitalist
societies
>are relatively benign?
>
That is why I mentioned slavery in the Sudan, after all.
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Well that just goes to show that to many millions slavery is an acceptable norm, especially when it occurs in cultures that don't share western notions of self-ownership or personhood. The US un-civil war shows the limits of the use of reasonable arguments in attempting to eradicate slavery [yes the US un-civil war was about far more than abolishing slavery]. Hopefully this century such horrors will not be needed to end such an inhumane economic practice. It remains to be seen whether the idiom of objectivity will be helpful in this regard. Would any of us deny that, if successful, an imposition of a norm will be taking place?
Ian